Blair Collection > Beside the fire

Xliv PREFACE.
Stranger who tries to speak Irish in Ireland runs the
serious risk of being looked upon a proselytizing Eng-
lishman. As matters are still progressing gaily in this
direction, let nobody be surprised if a pure Aryan lan-
guage which, at the time of the famine, in '47, was spoken
at least four million souls (more than the whole popu-
lation of Switzerland), becomes in a few years as extinct
as Cornish, Of course, there is not a shadow of necessity,
either social or economical, for this. All the world
knows that bi-linguists are superior to men who know
only one language, yet in Ireland everyone pretends to
believe the contrary, A few words from the influential
leaders of the race when next they visit Achill, for in-
stance, would help to keep Irish alive there in smcula
s(BCuloriim, and with the Irish language, the old Aryan
folk-lore, the Ossianic poems, numberless ballads, folk-
songs, and proverbs, and a thousand and one other in-
teresting things that survive when Irish is spoken, and
die when it dies. But, from a complexity of causes which
I am afraid to explain, the men who for the last sixty
years have had the ear of the Irish race have persistently
shown the cold shoulder to everything that was Irish and
racial, and while protesting, or pretending to protest,
against West Britonism, have helped, more than anyone
else, by their example, to assimilate us to England and
the English, thus running counter to the entire voice of
modern Europe, which is in favour of extracting the best